Novel
The Murmuring Coast
A Costa dos Murmúrios
Lídia Jorge · 1988
Synopsis
Evita arrives in Beira, Mozambique, to marry Luís Alex, a young officer. The wedding is splendid, the uniforms impeccable, toasts are drunk at the Stella Maris hotel, where the officers' wives are staying. Around them, the colonial war is ending badly, and what is said about it at table bears no resemblance to what is happening outside. She watches, she listens, and she begins to stop believing what she is told.
Context
The book is made up of two texts. The first, Os Gafanhotos, is a short narrative by an author who is never named, which tells of this wedding as it was told at the time. The second, much longer, is narrated by Eva Lopo, who was there and who takes it up again in order to undo it; behind her surface real episodes of the war, Operation Gordian Knot of 1970 and the Wiriyamu massacre of 1972. The author draws here on the three years she had lived in Mozambique before 1974.
Who it is for
A novel in two parts, the second of which rereads the first. Both must be read in order, and one must accept not knowing which to believe.
Prizes and reception
An immediate success, nearly fifty thousand copies in less than a year; the book that confirmed its author's standing, adapted for the cinema by Margarida Cardoso in 2004.
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